Establishing and maintaining optimum airflow characteristics throughout a storage system environment may be functionally desirable, e.g., to promote cooling of the system, regardless of the system configuration. One of the most undesirably impactful components to a storage system's airflow may be the storage configuration, or drive population. Where a storage system has unused storage bays, industry standards may call for a removable drive filler to be used in place of a drive to fill the entirety of the storage bay, e.g., in an attempt to maintain optimum airflow characteristics by creating a high airflow impedance. Removable drive fillers, however, tend to be costly accessories that are often lost or thrown away by users who do not want to store them and/or insert or remove them from storage system drives each time a drive configuration changes. These actions may lead to functionality issues if the user decides that he or she no longer needs to operate with a fully populated drive configuration. For example, removing drives from a storage bay without replacing the drive with a removable drive filler may substantially alter airflow pathways by decreasing airflow impedance within the storage system.